In many fields of endeavor, and notably biomedical sciences, veterinary sciences, and environmental sciences, it is important to be able to detect molecules of interest (i.e., analytes) in samples that have been collected, for example, from test subjects (e.g., patients, laboratory and farm animals, pets, etc.) or the environment. To meet these needs, many different assays have been developed, ranging from lateral flow devices (e.g., home pregnancy tests), to immunoprecipitations and ELISAs, to mass spectrometry. These assays have proven very useful, but often suffer from a number of important drawbacks, such as being costly to implement, time consuming, technically complicated, hard to scale up for large sample sizes or large numbers of samples, etc.
There remains a need in the art for new assays for detecting analytes in samples.